


Playing Pretend

by cortexikid



Series: Symbiote Cinema: Klyntar's Harshest Critic [4]
Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Abusive Father, Angst and Humor, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bad Parenting, Eddie and Venom watch IT, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Like Eddie's father but they don't talk about that, M/M, Venom finds clowns lame, Venom is jealous of Bill Hader, there are things in this world a lot scarier, until they do
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2019-11-10
Packaged: 2021-01-26 05:47:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21369145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cortexikid/pseuds/cortexikid
Summary: Eddie suppressed his smirk as he heard Venom scoff loudly from the vicinity of his shoulder blade.“Not a fan of Stephen King classics, buddy?” He asked, shoving a handful of popcorn in his mouth as Pennywise held up a paper boat on the TV.Humans’ collective fear of clowns is...pathetic. They are just pale men in large shoes with unattractive hair. We see plenty of those in coffee shops every day.Venom thinks Pennywise is a dumb name name for a clown. Eddie agrees.He and his symbiote sit down to watch IT: Chapter One on their horror-movie marathon night but both get more than they were bargained for when Eddie is reminded of his father.
Relationships: Eddie Brock & Venom Symbiote, Eddie Brock/Venom Symbiote
Series: Symbiote Cinema: Klyntar's Harshest Critic [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1183076
Comments: 22
Kudos: 201





	Playing Pretend

**Author's Note:**

> So, I’ve been on an IT kick lately, mostly writing fic for post-Chapter Two, but then I recently re-watched Venom for the fifth (?) time and this idea sprang to mind lol.
> 
> It started out all fun with silly jokes about Bill Hader and how he’s apparently a sex symbol or something now, but soon got darker than I originally intended so warnings for mentions of child abuse, mental and physical. I take liberties with comic book canon. 
> 
> On a lighter note, Venom thinks Pennywise is a basic bitch.

_“Here...take it. Take it, Georgie.”_

Eddie suppressed his smirk as he heard Venom scoff loudly from the vicinity of his shoulder blade. 

“Not a fan of Stephen King classics, buddy?” He asked, shoving a handful of popcorn in his mouth as Pennywise held up a paper boat on the TV. 

_**Humans’ collective fear of clowns is...pathetic. They are just pale men in large shoes with unattractive hair. We see plenty of those in coffee shops every day. ** _

Eddie shrugged, grimacing as poor, one-armed Georgie was dragged down into the sewers, a trail of crimson being washed away by the rain. 

“I dunno, I kinda get it,” he murmured, shifting on the couch, sinking further into the cushions as the title card came up on screen, “There’s just something...unsettling about them. I remember watching the IT miniseries in the ‘90s. It was right before I went to the circus with my aunt. Tim Curry had scared the shit outta me to the point I nearly wet myself when some bozo in an orange wig tapped me on the shoulder.” 

Venom hummed. 

** _You threw your popcorn at him. _ **

Eddie chuckled, “Yeah, I did. My poor aunt Betty, she was so embarrassed. Kept apologizing as the guy wiped butter off his face.”

Venom joined in on his laughing, a black, inky tendril sneaking out to snatch up an astounding amount of popcorn. Out of the corner of his eye, Eddie could see the glint of his bodymate’s razor-sharp teeth as they unhinged to munch on the food. He smiled to himself, amused at his friend’s antics. It made him realise that Pennywise’s teeth really weren’t all that scary to him, anymore. Save for him using his to munch on children, not popcorn, of course. 

“I remember when we got home, Betty gave me a lecture on not wasting food,” he paused, adopting a high-pitched, nasally voice that he knew was a poor imitation of his dearly-departed loved one, “There are children dying of hunger in the world, Edward. You shouldn’t be so wasteful.”

He shrugged, “I mean, she was right. I remember feeling so guilty that I worked twice as hard that year at the food drive,” he snorted, “My dad—”

Eddie broke off suddenly, a familiar itch at the back of his neck. 

“—anyway, like I said, I get the whole clown thing. They’re weird, and creepy. And this Skarsgård guy seems to be doin’ alright at being both." 

A surge of something, jolted through Eddie that let him know that Venom wanted to make a remark, but was holding himself back. He knew the symbiote did not fail to notice his abrupt redirection of conversation. It was a common enough occurrence by now, whenever Eddie accidentally slipped up and mentioned his dear ol’ pops. 

But, oddly enough, it seemed to be one of the few topics his bodymate didn’t press him on. Eddie just wasn’t sure if that was a good thing, or not. 

After a beat or two, the tension broke and they settled into a comfortable silence—or as close to silence as they could get in between snarky comments and critiques of the horror genre—for a good portion of the film, with one or two stray observations from the symbiote. 

_ **These children have no self-preservation instinct. ** _

“Well, we can't all have an alien buddy looking out for us, V,” Eddie grinned, before wincing as on-screen Eddie Kaspbrak fell through a floor and landed hard on the table below, his arm now at a grotesque angle. 

_ **That Eddie needs an alien buddy looking out for him. ** _

Eddie Brock laughed.

“Pretty sure that’s what he has Richie for,” he mumbled, watching as the kids’ panic grew with Pennywise edging towards them.

_“Eddie! Eddie—look at me—”_

Venom shifted a little closer into Eddie’s side as on-screen Richie Tozier yelled desperately at his friend, clutching the young boy’s face in his hands.

_ **Pity HE cannot fix broken bones.** _

The stress Venom placed on the word ‘he’ had Eddie stifling a snort and rolling his eyes. 

“Yeah, yeah, you’d do it all so much better. Pennywise wouldn’t stand a chance against you, V,” he grinned, taking a sip of his beer and kicking his feet up on the coffee table. 

_“Okay I’m gonna—I’m gonna snap your arm into place—”_

_“Rich, do not touch me! Do not fucking touch me!”_

Venom hissed while Eddie winced at the loud sound of snapping bone emitting from the TV, quickly accompanied by the child actor’s (very convincing) roar of pain.

Something flashed through Eddie’s mind then, as the scream rang in his ears, of a time when he himself had broken a bone, long before he had ever had his very own alien buddy to heal it for him. 

There, flashing in front of his eyes like a macabre film reel (the projector scene from the movie still clearly resonating with him) was nine-year-old Eddie Brock, clutching his very broken wrist, lip jutted out as he tried to stop the tears in his eyes from falling. 

_“Look at what you made me do, Eddie! Just look at this mess! What the hell am I gonna do with you?!”_

He could still hear his father's voice, tinged with raw fury, clear as day, even now, thirty years later. 

Could see the cold gleam in his eyes when he wrenched Eddie closer to him by the neck of his T-shirt, shoving him out the door without a jacket and into the car on the cold, December night , high-tailing it to the hospital with his ‘accident prone’ son who had ‘fallen off his bike again.’ 

_“Isn’t that right, Eddie? Tell the doctor what happened, son.”_

_ **Eddie…? ** _

He was jolted back from his reverie by the sound of Venom’s voice, gentler than he had ever heard it, somehow both inside his mind and out, his disembodied head floating in front of Eddie’s face, blocking the television. 

Slowly, Eddie raised his eyes to meet Venom’s cloudy ones. 

“Sorry, V. Zoned out for a sec. What did you say?” 

Something complicated crossed his bodymate’s face, that, even after extensive study of symbiotes’ range of facial expressions over time, Eddie still found himself at a loss of its meaning. 

_ **I said that the children portray pain and fear very convincingly. ** _

Venom had struggled with the concept of movies, and all manner of fictional entertainment really, for a while. It was hard for him to grasp that humanity at large, amused themselves with such concepts, why they would want to watch someone suffer, or be hurt, or kill each other and actually gain enjoyment from it. 

Then Eddie had introduced him to sitcoms. 

And Venom introduced himself to rom-coms, soap operas, buddy-cop movies, musicals and everything in between. Horror films were a relatively new addition. One which Eddie couldn’t be sure had been his best idea. 

“Yeah, they’re good actors,” he agreed, ever impressed with the Stranger Things kid as well as the others he didn’t know.

_ **Acting is...like playing pretend. Like children do. ** _

Venom had also taken to reading everything and anything he could get Eddie’s hands on (or his own tendrils on when Eddie’s back was turned) and had somehow managed to read several child-development books when Eddie crashed at his desk one night after burning out doing research for his latest case. 

“Yeah,” he conceded before he cleared his throat, taking another sip of beer, “acting is kinda like playing pretend, I suppose.”

There was a beat of silence as they both watched Richie Tozier and Bill Denbrough yell at each other before the latter punched the former in the face. 

_ **Did you ever...play pretend? ** _

Eddie startled. Out of all the things Venom could have asked, he wasn’t expecting him to ask that. 

He rubbed the back of his neck, draining the last of his beer. Venom still wasn’t a huge fan of the taste, but he put up with it every once and awhile. Just like Eddie did whenever Venom had a hankering for rapist entrails or human-trafficker pancreas. 

“I probably did, yeah. Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians—”

_(Happy families with an alive mom and a good dad that didn’t blame me for everything wrong in the world)_

—that kinda thing” he shrugged, trying to ignore the uncomfortable twist in his stomach, “typical playground stuff.” 

Venom nodded, floating a little closer so that Eddie’s cheek and Venom’s approximation of one, were almost touching. 

Eddie knew he couldn’t hide anything from his bodymate, not really. But he appreciated that Venom was trying hard to respect whatever faux-privacy they tried to establish. They had come a long way in the last year. 

The quiet between them lasted approximately ten more minutes. 

Until the character, Beverly, tried to leave her house and her dad forcibly grabbed her hand. 

Eddie’s entire body tensed, recoiling as he watched with wide eyes as the grown man advanced on the young girl, his tone furious, his voice raised, his eyes shining with fury. 

And just like that, he was ten years old again with a black eye darker than his hair. Twelve again with a dislocated shoulder. Fourteen again with his jaw wired shut. Every age and a myriad of injuries from his “clumsiness” up until the day he turned eighteen and got the hell outta dodge as fast as his legs could carry him with barely more than the clothes on his back. 

** _He can’t hurt you anymore, Eddie..._ **

There was that quiet, gentle tone again. Eddie looked away from the television, staring resolutely at the empty beer bottle in his hand before heaving a sigh and putting it down on the coffee table with a soft clunk. 

“I know, V. I know.” 

He rarely thought of his father anymore. Maybe just once or twice a year, when something like this would spark a memory. Something deep in the back of his mind that he had forced himself to bury in order to survive. 

He could feel Venom’s piercing stare at the side of his face. 

“He used to wait up for me. Every night. To make sure I didn’t break curfew.” 

This was directed to the floor, barely above a whisper. 

“I remember one night, I was seventeen, three days off eighteen. I got...I got held up at work,” he paused, hunching his shoulders, “I used to do odd-jobs for Joe, this old mechanic in my neighbourhood and he—he needed my help with something, I can’t remember now but...I forgot to call Carl, let him know I’d be late for dinner.” 

Eddie knew Venom knew all this. Had seen this particular memory flash through his brain like a bolt of lightning one night after Eddie was forced to re-live it in his nightmare. 

There were things he had been able to discuss with Anne. Things his father had said, had done, but this particular night, this memory, Eddie had shoved so far to the back of his brain that it only ever leaked out when he was unconscious. 

Except for now. 

Today, in the comfort of his own home, with the comforting presence of his bodymate, his symbiote, his best friend, he felt ready to talk about it. For the first time since it happened. 

“He was quiet, when I got in.” 

Eddie picked at the hole in the knee of his jeans, realizing that Venom must have lowered the volume on the TV unbeknownst to him as Beverly’s plight was now barely audible over the rush of his ears. 

“He always got quiet when...when he was really mad.” 

His throat felt dry, scratchy, but he didn’t make a move for another beer. Instead, he wrung his hands together, shoving down the urge to bite his nails. 

“I remember I...I was in a good mood. Whatever I had helped Joe with, I got a good tip and I had been saving up for this heap of crap that Joe was giving me a good deal on. So I—I didn’t really notice anything off at first.” 

Venom hummed, a single, slender tendril reaching out and gently weaving itself in between Eddie’s tense hands, squeezing reassuringly. 

A ghost of a smile crossed Eddie’s face as he watched the tendril settle itself around the fingers of his left hand. 

“I was heating up my dinner when I remembered I had forgot to call him,” he whispered, keeping his eyes trained on he left hand, clenching it and unclenching it as the long-buried memory made its way to the surface of his mind. 

“I...I tried to explain to him, apologize, but he just—” Eddie swallowed around the lump in his throat. 

Venom nuzzled himself against his neck.

“He hit me from behind. Punched me in the back of the head so hard I...I stumbled and cracked my skull against the stove, singeing my hair.” 

God, he didn’t even realise what had happened at first. He just remembered the jolt of pain from the blow to the head, followed by the hot sting of boiling water scalding him where he knocked his soup off the stove, down on top of himself. 

“When I came to, he was standing over me. This…look on his face. Like—Like I was some disgusting rat that he was done with dealing with. I had made this giant mess, just like he said I always did. The soup and my blood had stained his floor and I was the ungrateful son that was not only to blame for his wife’s death, but every other bad thing that ever happened to Carl Brock. I—that was the first time I realised that if I didn’t get out of that house soon…he would kill me. He would_ kill me_ over a missed curfew. Because he hated me that much.”

Eddie gasped in a shaky breath, only then realizing that he hadn’t taken in proper air as he rushed through the memory.

He hung his head, blinking away the tears that had built up behind his eyes.

He felt Venom rake a tendril through his hair softly.

“I…I went to Joe the day I turned eighteen and he…he gave me the car. I left town the same day and never looked back.”

His eyes wandered back to the TV, where he watched a young Beverly, so much younger than he had been, pummel her father with a piece of a ceramic sink, knocking him to the ground with a satisfying thump. 

Eddie would be lying if he said he himself had never wished he could have done the same to his own father. 

_ **He will never hurt you again. ** _

Eddie turned his head to regard Venom, who was still hovering close to his neck. 

“I--”

_ **We will not let him. ** _

Warmth bloomed in Eddie’s stomach at the steel in his bodymate’s tone. It was the same one he used for intimating bad guys, and in any other circumstance, it would have been alarming, but here, in this moment, Eddie found it comforting. 

What that said about him? He wasn’t sure. 

“I know, V,” he smiled, nudging his temple against Venom’s gently. 

And he did know. He knew for a fact that his father never remarried, never had anymore children and had been confined to a nursing home in Maine for eight years now, ever since he had had a stroke. Eddie checked up on him, every now and again, (his skills as an investigative journalist did come in handy) just to see if he was alive or dead. 

He wasn’t sure how he would feel either way.

It felt like a lifetime ago and only yesterday since he was that crying, bloodied teenager staring up at the man who was supposed to care for him, be there for him, love him. 

The man that he knew he would barely recognize if he ever saw him again, but simultaneously couldn’t forget the hate in his eye or the acid in his tone. 

The man Eddie did everything in his power not to become. 

To instead stand up for the little guy, fight for injustice, rally against corruption and protect the innocent, however he could. 

And that was before he had met a wondrous, shit-talking alien. 

The same wondrous, shit-talking alien that was now settling under his chin, vying for Eddie’s attention in a way that he somehow thought was subtle, but couldn’t be more obvious. 

“The sequel is playing in the movie theatre up the street,” Eddie murmured against the top of Venom’s head, taking his chance, knowing his symbiote was most ameanable when in cuddle-mode. 

“You wanna go see it tomorrow?” He asked gently as he leaned back into the couch, smirking as Venom let out a high-pitched whine (that he would 100% deny later) at being jostled. 

_ **You only want to see it because of glasses man.** _

Eddie didn’t need to see his face to know he was sulking.

“You mean Bill Hader? Uh, yeah, he plays the older Richie, but—”

_ **You find him...attractive.** _

“Yeah, me and the rest of the internet.”

The retort was out of his mouth at rapid speed, but Venom didn’t seem to appreciate his joke. In fact, if Eddie didn’t know better, he’d say that the symbiote was now actively pouting. 

_ **You watch a lot of stuff he’s in. Movies, TV shows, documentaries. Even children’s entertainment that only his voice is in! And your YouTube history—** _

“How many times do I have to tell you to stop going through my history, V? I made you your own account so you can watch clips of that British baking show you love so much without messing up my recommendations.” 

Venom murmured something incoherent into his neck.

Eddie paused, taking that moment to reflect, eyebrows slowly raising up his forehead as he mentally considered just how closely he kept an eye on Bill Hader’s career for it to become of note.

_ **I don’t understand your attraction to him. ** _

“Neither does the rest of the internet, buddy.”

He smiled again at his little joke, and wasn’t one bit surprised when again, Venom failed to appreciate it. 

A few quiet minutes passed between them, Eddie eating the last of the popcorn, kernels skirting along the bottom of the bowl included, before Venom eventually piped up. 

_ **Do you want to...play adult pretend with glasses man? ** _

“I’m not sure he actually wears glasses in real life, bud. And what do you mean by ‘adult pretend’?” Eddie asked, brow furrowing as he leaned over the coffee table to clear away the debris of their movie night, the credits of IT: Chapter One beginning to roll. 

The symbiote paused, as if considering his next words. 

_ **We read about it. Adult pretending. When humans role-play together during se—** _

Eddie stood up suddenly, as if electrocuted. 

“W-What? What the hell are you talking abou—”

_ **You and Anne adult pretended a few—** _

“Nope. No. It’s a hard pass on that conversation, V,” Eddie cut across him, his voice climbing higher and higher, “but first, for the record, Bill Hader is a famous actor and comedian, so definitely out of my league, even if he was available. Second, I don’t know what the hell kinda books and shit you’ve been looking into, but I do not want to know about it. And third—”

He started to lose his steam, shoulders deflating as he wiped a palm down his face. 

“It’s getting late. I’m tired. Let’s just go to bed.” 

Venom gave a grumble, clearly put out by the abrupt end of the discussion, but Eddie refused to relent. It was too late and he was too damn old and tired and sexually-frustrated to even entertain the idea of broaching a subject like that. 

_ **That’s why I asked, Eddie. We could try it. Adult pretending can be a great way to relieve—** _

“No, Venom. No more talking.”

Eddie shut off the lights in the living room, trying to ignore his flushed cheeks as he trudged towards his bedroom with heavy footfalls.

What a night. He was physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted. Which was becoming a not uncommon occurrence the more he and Venom got to know each other. 

He heaved a sigh when he pulled off his T-shirt and jeans, sinking down into his bed. 

All thoughts of the last night he had seen his father had flown from his brain as soon as Venom had mentioned Bill Hader and role-playing in the same sentence. You could say a lot of things about his bodymate, but predictable wasn’t one of them. 

_**Eddie? **_A voice piped up predictably just as he had closed his eyes to try and sleep. 

“Yeah, V?”

_ **I enjoyed the film. ** _

“Me too.”

_ **But I think Pennywise is a dumb name for a clown. ** _

A small smile spread across Eddie’s face, his eyes still closed.

“Me too.” 

A beat of silence passed, where Eddie almost drifted off. 

_ **Eddie? ** _

“Hmm?” 

_ **Why does so much of the internet want to adult pretend with a torturous, child-killing clown? ** _

* * *

You can find more of my [Venom fic here.](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1183076) And my [IT (Reddie) fic here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20943875/chapters/49794191), if that's your thing :) 

**Author's Note:**

> So there ya have it. Hope you enjoyed! Would love to know what you think of this odd mash-up :)


End file.
